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Romanzen und Balladen IV, Op 64

Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

'Hyperion’s Schumann series continues to strike gold with a collection … that finds baritone Christopher Maltman on superb form … with this ...'This is a treasurable issue – generous in quality and quantity alike. As with the Hyperion Schubert Song edition one struggles for new ways of expres ...» More

Why another Dichterliebe recording? Because Gerald Finley has simply one of the greatest voices of his generation, and is an artist at the peak of his powers. He brings to this noble cycle the supreme musical understanding that characterizes all his ...» More

'Schäfer evokes comparison with Elisabeth Schumann and with the young Elly Ameling, whom in tone and freshness of response she often resembles. In sum ...'Her voice combines ethereal radiance and clarity with resolute, unwavering focus. Johnson's account of the piano parts is superlative [and] his bookl ...» More

'An unqualified success … a glorious interpreter, warm-voiced and wholly in sympathy with the task in hand. The famous cycle Frauenliebe und Lebe ...'The care that has gone into the literary and musicological side of the project is perfectly matched by the musical results. Banse proves to be a wond ...» More

This is one of this composer’s apt and amusing miniature song-portraits. If Schumann lacks the natural identification with the female psyche that is one of Schubert’s special gifts (in the Gretchen, Mignon and Lady of the Lake songs among others), no one could accuse him of not trying very hard. He is a ladies’ man enamoured of women, with a story to tell. Schumann is amused by pert and bossy characters like Goethe’s Philine (noticeably avoided by Schubert) and he gives a platform to the formidably angry highland widow, Die Hochländer-Witwe of Robert Burns. He seems predisposed to smallness of stature, delicacy of foot and strength of character which suggests that this composer is Dickens to Schubert’s Shakespeare. Die Kartenlegerin has already been dealt with on this disc, and that little card is a closer relative of Die Soldatenbraut than of the earnest bride and mother of Frauenliebe und -leben – an exemplary character like Agnes Wickfield or Florence Dombey. But the girl who dreams of being the soldier’s wife is both pushy and silly, unworldly to a fault, yet adorable. Dora Spenlow, David Copperfield’s first wife, comes to mind.

The whole premise of the songs such as these, where Bella vita militar confronts the fairer sex, goes back to Mozart’s Così fan tutte when Fiordiligi and Dorabella bid their lovers a tearful goodbye, only to fall in love with Albanian interlopers – the same lovers in disguise. Sie blasen zum Abmarsch from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch is a good example of a march-song which brings echoes of the opera back to mind, and Der Tambour (Mörike) complains of homesickness from the young drummer’s point of view, where even the moon seems to shine in French. But for the nearest equivalent to Die Soldatenbraut one must look to Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch and the imprecations, half tearful, half sarcastic, of the singer of Ihr jungen Leute as she begs leniency and special treatment for her lover unused to the rigours of the military campaign. The theme of the soldier returning to find life with a demanding wife just as difficult as fighting battles is amusingly treated by Wolf in the Gottfried Keller setting Tretet ein, höher Krieger.

Die Soldatenbraut is built around the rhythm of a mock march, where the scale of the proceedings is never allowed to be expansive enough to encompass the battlefield. Soldiers’ music (cf the serious and disturbing Der Soldat, Volume 2) permeates the song. But the neat little rhythm where the fourth beat of the bar is cutely phrased up toward the first of the next, and the staccato march is as crisp as a lick of new paint, suggests the toy cupboard rather than the real world. After ‘Ach, wenn’s nur der König auch wüsst’ a brief interjection in dotted rhythms indicates the girl’s petulant displeasure – the king really ought to know how bold her beau is! A brief passage in a more military-sounding C minor envisages the young man laying down his life for the king, but somehow we don’t believe a word of it – particularly when the vocal interval of the descending diminished seventh of ‘Blut’ seems so arch, and the teasing harmonies of the next phrase (the bridging chords are G minor and is C7) under ‘für mich aber eben so gut’ seem so cute as to make the comparison deliberately silly. Laying down one’s life does not mean anything as serious as dying. Our charming commentator does not have the slightest idea about the battlefield and its horrors.

The second verse is a chance to hear the catchy tune once again. (The song’s structure is basically AABA with coda.) Once again the piano’s interjections illustrate annoyance – this time that the lover is not decorated with military star and ribbon; of course he should be! – and the pomposity of the general’s rank (those C minor chords again) is contrasted with her exasperation that he is not allowed home on leave. Woe betide the general if she were ever to meet him! One realises that Schumann relishes the girl’s tenacity and faithfulness, and the fact that she is unimpressed by the bigwigs: military power is unable to order and regulate a woman’s love.

Like many a soldier’s wife-to-be, the wedding is the most important campaign of all. The middle section of the third strophe (marked ‘langsamer’ – slower) casts a magical spell; the girl, mainly a mover and shaker, allows herself to dream for a few bars. An echo of the dotted march rhythm remains in the tenor voice of the accompaniment but, smoothed out by the slower tempo and in this verbal context, it seems descriptive of blinking stars. The piano’s chords under ‘dort über Marien-Kapell’ are touched with antiquity to suggest church music and the harmonium accompanying the wedding hymns. And now Mörike uses verbal puns to show us that the little minx is not going to be a passively adoring wife. Words that have described the ribbon and cross of military honour and decoration are re-employed to depict the wreath of red roses (‘Band’) that will seal their bond (also ‘Band’ in German’). Once on the leash he will have a different type of cross to bear, and this is underlined by the fact that ‘Hauskreuz’, meaning domestic trouble and strife, will be his new croix de guerre. The piano interlude, rattling semiquavers followed by terse and determined staccato quavers, implies that her new legal status as a wife will make her a force to be reckoned with, someone to keep both the new husband, and his wretched employers, on their toes.

The last verse is a repeat of the first. We are reminded that the marriage is, as yet, a fantasy, and is a female counterpart of the drummer-boy’s dreams of mouth-watering food in Wolf’s Der Tambour. And then we remember that these two wonderful songs, though by different composers, have a great poet in common. The subtlety of Mörike accounts for the marvellous mix of innocence and malevolent wit (the girl is so shamelessly ambitious, both for herself and her fiancé). The extended postlude is a worthy end to a delicious little song. The pert staccato chords, little military rumbles in semiquavers in both hands, and the voice joining in right at the end (with a final ‘für mich … aber eben so gut’) remind us that she is very much in charge of the proceedings and that, whatever the politicians say, the world revolves around her, the mother of future generations of little soldiers. The piquant little flourish (two forte chords, then a piano one in the nimbus of the louder, as if a feminine smile at blustering authority) ends the song as if knocked into a cocked hatbox.

The composer’s Haushaltbuch tells us that on the day before (29 May 1847) another Mörike setting was composed (Die Soldatenbraut), that the weather was glorious, and that the Schumanns heard Pauline Viardot in a concert that evening. These were not particularly productive times in Dresden (the composer was working with difficulty on his opera Genoveva) but at least there were not the complications of the revolution-beleaguered days of 1849. Despite the fact that this is a song redolent of cold and bleak weather, we can hear the summer sunlight in the fecundity with which the composer tackled this lyric which Sams says is ‘by far the finest poem that Schumann had ever set’. There are already signs of a new musical style: the chromaticism and solemnity of Bach has entered into this music, e.g. underneath ‘schwinden’ and ‘so darein’ as if to emphasise the timeless and repetitive nature of the story of boy abandoning girl—‘es ist eine alte Geschichte’ as the composer sang elsewhere. There is also a great economy of invention: the descending-third sequence of the opening is the germ from which the song grows and it is repeated in various guises as an analogue for the girl’s obsession with the boy, and her inability to think of anything else. Three-part harmony for the girl’s grief (as in Mädchen-Schwermut) suggests that there is a crucial element lacking (the boy’s love, of course) to allow her to be a whole person; the rising octave in the accompaniment after ‘springen die Funken’ is identified by Sams as a motif of yearning (as in Kommen und Scheiden); the E flat third (the highest chord in the piece) is illustrative of light as the sparks fly upwards. The dark depths of the bass coincide with the word ‘Nacht’ and reappear at the end with the girl’s fervent wish for another, perhaps a final, nightfall.

Of course the inevitable comparison with Wolf’s Das verlassene Mägdlein has placed this song in the shade. Which is a pity. We know that Wolf knew and admired this song, and he even perpetuates two of Schumann’s changes from Mörike’s original text. His own definitive setting seems as much a homage to Schumann as a rival viewpoint.

The marking is ‘Rasch und mit Feuer’ and we are suddenly plunged into an Italianate world of quasi-operatic passion. The melody is also good enough to pass muster in an opera house – La Fenice perhaps, for this is a grown-up and much more serious version of the second of the Veneziansiche Lieder from Myrthen where Thomas Moore plans to flee Venice’s Piazzetta by boat with the beautiful Ninetta. The journey here is a bigger one, not merely midnight dalliance but a promise made for life. Syncopations in the piano writing throb excitedly beneath a convincingly expansive vocal line and a strongly placed bass which engenders a bracing sense of harmonic vitality. These things convey a real sense of mastery – both in terms of the character who sings the song and the composer who wrote it. How often had Robert sought to convince Clara that if she feared life without her father he would play that role as well as that of tender husband! The musical emphases on ‘dein Vaterland und Vaterhaus’ (accented chords, stirring modulations) betoken the composer’s own memories of anger and anguish. There is a vehemence to this music which makes it easy to believe that these words are not merely poetic hyperbole, but that the singer is pleading for his very life.

The four-bar piano interlude after ‘Vaterhaus!’ (also the basis of the postlude) is one of the most passionate in all Schumann’s lieder. It is also strangely familiar, this pianistic portrait of the protagonist’s qualities as if he were demonstrating what sort of a husband he would prove to be if given the chance. It is not coincidence then that as the pianist engages in those swaggering mordents, grace notes ornamenting the exuberant right-hand melody, he should perceive a more tender underlay – namely, the gently ornamented phrase ‘Wie so milde, wie so gut’ from Er, der Herrlichste von allen (Frauenliebe und -leben) where the young girl ponders all the qualities of the man with whom she is in love, and seems to value most his gentleness and goodness. Here the composer seems to be saying that those admirable qualities can also be translated into determination and action. This loving ‘turn’ of phrase is also the basis of the Eusebius movement in Carnaval and the message here is that even a dreamer must turn into a man of action to win fair lady.

Heine’s second verse is Schumann’s middle verse because of the composer’s decision to recapitulate the first. This is a classic minore ‘B’ section for an aria and here the singer (and the poet) are not afraid of that emotional blackmail (threats of death whether by heartbreak or suicide) which are at the heart of almost every decent operatic seduction. At ‘Entfliehn wir nicht, so sterb’ ich hier’ the vocal line rises in accusatory sequences (as if to say you could not possibly refuse), its dotted rhythms followed by canonic imitation in the bass, one more stirring detail in a song which is altogether superbly crafted. And Schumann simply could not resist a return to the music of the first verse and a repeat which is not to be found in Heine’s pithy scheme of things. The composer is justifiably proud of his melody and the amount of musical energy he has conjured in such a short time. In fact the music needs the repeat, even if the poem does not. The nine-bar postlude is a combination of the bars with those eloquent mordents, as well as the accented crotchet chords which have come to signify ‘Vaterland und Vaterhaus’. Here they seem to break out of their previous mould, triumphantly ascending, as if to tell the listener that the couple has successfully eloped by jumping over the stave. Mission accomplished! But there are already ominous signs that all is not well. The music which has been so active suddenly freezes on a semibreve chord which melts into an ominous cadence within a diminuendo and a ritardando. The former confidence evaporates, and with this descent into the bass tessitura of the piano we are warned of impending disaster.

Unlike his wife’s setting of these words, Schumann’s song has no title of Volkslied. And yet it is perhaps the nearest the composer comes to a folksong style in his works if one excludes the deliberate naivety of some of the children’s pieces. The first-person narrator, the lover convincing his beloved to flee with him, has vanished. He is replaced with a timeless observer, the narrator who tells as story of something that has happened long ago. (It is now that we realise that Schumann has regarded the operatic swagger of the previous song as time-travelling of sorts, typical of an old-fashioned musical style.) The time signature is 6/8, and the page seems empty of music. A forlorn horn-call, dropping thirds and sixths in the minor key, introduces each verse of a strophic song. The tune is a touching one with a truly haunting turn of phrase and is accompanied in minimalist fashion by mezzo staccato quaver chords, as if frost is the equivalent of frozen raindrops. (In the second strophe these same quavers seem illustrative of furtive secrecy, in the third of the aimless disorientation of the lovers.) The phrase ‘Sie sind verwelket, verdorret’ is harmonised by a two-quaver phrase in the accompaniment that shifts into the submediant. This is C major in the song’s original key of E minor, and it may be that Schumann associates this ‘white’ tonality with emptiness – colourless flowers withered by the frost (compare the very different colour for the setting of ‘Blaublümelein’). The key words ‘verwelket’ and ‘verdorret’ (cf Clara Schumann’s ‘verdorrt’) are set to long note values on their second vowels; this emphasises their bleak meaning and compensates for what seem like missing syllables in the metre of the last line. The effect is to make the music stumble in an admirably appropriate way. A bar of interlude wrong-foots the music with chords on the third and sixth quaver of the bar.

The second verse is a more or less identical. Once again we hear the mournful horn music. This time it introduces a tiny synopsis of the elopement that we have heard planned in the first song. The abandoned ‘Vater’ and ‘Mutter’ are dryly consigned to the distant regions of the submediant. After another awkward interlude of quavers on the ‘wrong’ part of the bar, as if emotion was catching the listener off guard, that horn motif introduces the third verse and the last instalment of the story. Here the music seems to describe the emptiness of wasted lives and unfulfilled promise. There is one telling difference: the word ‘verdorben’ is set to an entirely new diminished harmony. The second syllable of this biting participle is set to a rising minor sixth; in the context of this song without large musical contours this is an eloquent statement of compassion and regret, even anger. After the matter-of-fact way in which the tragedy has been recounted, the mask of folksong neutrality slips, but only for a second. One can never rewrite history, only learn from it. What follows is silence, two further disorientated chords, and the final sound of the horn. The mystery of this hunting motif is extremely atmospheric; it is as if these poor babes in the wood have been lost and perished deep in a forest of nightmares.

Schumann’s decision to cast the third movement of this song-suite as a duet is typically impractical. It means that Tragödie is seldom heard as the composer intended; even in a duet-recital the sudden appearance of the mezzo soprano voice seems a curious adjunct to a work that has begun so passionately for the male singer. But Heine’s words about a grave suggest the world of the spirit, and the composer wanted something unearthly here. In his second canticle Abraham and Isaac, Benjamin Britten makes the voice of God out of the combined voices of the two protagonists, and Schumann has something similar in mind: the melded spirits (thus voices) of the lovers are suggested by a combination (particularly in the close spacing of the parts) which is not to be heard elsewhere on the recital platform. This is the voice of two dematerialised lovers who have become one.

The passions of love and the miserable pains of life (songs i and ii) here cede to the gentle strains of domestic duetting. This is an idyllic German scene complete with linden tree, birds, gentle and fragrant breezes, and a courting couple – a miller-lad as it happens (Heine knew his Wilhelm Müller) and his sweetheart. These lovers scarcely realise that they are a part of all the previous lovers who have ever been; but they can feel a presence in the very air which silences their chatter and which brings tears to their eyes. All of nature seems to contain particles of the unfortunate runaways who are now reborn into something new:

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose

So they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

Thomas Hardy: from Transformations

This sense of life in death, of new tendrils and green shoots emanating from those who are long gone, is beautifully illustrated in the first piano interlude of this song, and in the marvellously atmospheric coda. Even the look of this music on the printed page suggests budding shoots like lovers’ blessings growing at the graveside and woven into a protecting canopy of flowers. Another Britten song comes to mind, this time his Hölderlin setting Die Linien des Lebens where intersecting musical lines symbolise the destinies of different lives; these are made to criss-cross in the piano-writing to marvellous effect. Here Schumann unites rather similar layers of wafting counterpoint, first between the pianist’s hands, then in conjunction with the voices. This seems the perfect analogue for the mixing and intersection of souls, male and female, past and present – lovers all who are somehow united despite their diversity. Here they are framed by the age-old tradition of the German village green where courting couples have always plighted their troth. There are some particularly ravishing moments: the interrupted cadence on ‘Die Vögel singen so süss und so traurig’ is the purest Schumann, and ‘Die schwatzenden Buhlen, die werden stumm’ is also heart-stopping. At the phrase ‘Sie weinen und wissen selbst nicht warum’ (marked ‘Langsamer’) all the various strands and ‘voices’ are united in close harmony, the piano’s left hand doubling the male singer’s line. The postlude returns to the teasing counterpoint of breezes and birdsong; these die away to a murmur as the music descends the stave, coming to rest on a final cadence tinged with melancholy certainly, but purged of tragedy at last.